Chat Noir

I found Chat Noir (made by the crazy people at Gamedesign) today while stumbling and one of the things that I immediately liked about this game is how there are no instructions, and the player must learn how to play through trial and error. In Chat Noir you must stop a cat from escaping (it doesn't really matter where!) by creating a wall of dots to stop it.

At first I assumed that the best tactic was to place dots in the immediate vicinity of the cat, but then I realised that it's (probably) best to make a wall at the edge of the grid and try to keep ahead of that mischievous little critter hopping its way slowly towards your insanity. Even when I managed to trap the cat and fill in all the dots so the cat had nowhere to jump, it wasn't apparent that I'd won, the screen just faded out to white, but I'll just presume that's the end. Overall - a fun concept, nice art, intuitive game play and overall a really fun little game - for a few entertaining minutes at least.

Fold

In Fold you use gravity "anomaly's" to reach areas you could not otherwise get to. The anomaly's change the direction of gravity so you can stand on a vertical wall like it's the ground. In 'easy' you brave high cliffs, high falls, and rotating saw blades to reach the exit portal thingy. In 'uneasy' mode however you have to maneuver through mazes of rotating saw blades that move around and negotiate heights. I don't even want to know what sort of horror is contained in double uneasy, but I'm sure it isn't pretty.

All considered - a great twist on the sometimes monotonous platform game genre.

Spot the difference

I haven't come across many of these games, and when I do, they usually aren't too hot. This spot the difference game by Ivoryboy is different. He combines his wild sense of imagination with his great art style to create an entertaining and beautiful puzzle. Like all point and click games it can be a bit frustrating at times, but if you persevere it's well worth the effort. It was fun finishing all 15 puzzles and admiring the various ways the Ivoryboy hid the number of differences left to find. So stick in there and enjoy the ride.

POOM!

POOM! is a game where you bounce a ball off a changing grid of squares. The only way to tell where the ball is going to land is to see where the shadow is on the squares. This leads to a horrible period of learning where you get used to looking where the shadow is, but you quickly gets used to it. There are different types of squares that do different things, some make the ball bouce higher, make the ball bounce lower, or are worth points etc. There are a wide variety of different squares and the fun of the game is finding out what they do.

This game can be extremely frustrating, but very entertaining once you brave the steep learning curve.